With the ever-increasing amount of electronic information available, such as via the Internet, locating desired information can take a long time. For example, when searching for content on a specific topic a user often is presented with a few items that the user is interested in and many others that the user is not interested in.
Existing formats for displaying content often take the form of a list of blocks of text corresponding to each respective item. In a list, such as those displaying search or other user-initiated query results, the amount of content displayed in each block of text varies greatly. For example, one block of text in the list may include only three lines of text and another block of text within the same list may include twenty lines of text. Many conventional display formats provide the user a single format for viewing the list of text blocks, with no options for changing the output to show smaller or larger amounts of text in the blocks. Therefore, if a user desires quickly to see what the search has produced, the user must scroll through all of the items, which may take a long time if the amount of text displayed in the text blocks is large.
Some existing formats for displaying content have more than one granularity level for the amount of text displayed. For example, in a user-initiated term-based search, one existing format provides a first display option that shows, for each document found, sections of the document containing the search term and a second display option that shows only the title of each document. However, such formats generally are limited to just a few predetermined choices, such as a choice between a smaller amount of text, for example a title, and a larger amount of text, for example several paragraphs. As a result the user has little control over how much text is displayed. The user may want to quickly scan query results for a desired topic. However, the smaller option may not include enough information to discern whether a particular query result is on topic. On the other hand, the larger option may show too much text, requiring the user to spend significant time scrolling through the displayed results, including switching between pages of displayed results to see all of the results, thus decreasing the efficiency of the search. In addition, even with more than a few options for display of information, most systems have no mechanism to determine if any of the options provide the user the amount of information that will best suit the user's purpose and provide no option for continuously varying the amount of text displayed.
An additional problem with such limited option display formats is that the change is not immediately reflected in the display as the user changes back and forth between the options; the user must refresh or wait for the screen to reload. A related problem is that when the refresh occurs, generally the user is returned to the top of the list of displayed results. This process is problematic, for example, if the user begins with the smaller option, finds an interesting item part way down the list, and wants to see the expanded version of that item. Upon refresh, generally the display will return to the top of the list or query results. Thus, unless the user wants to see the expanded version of the first item, the user must re-scroll down to the desired item to see its expanded version, resulting in wasted search time.
Traditional systems also maintain no record of users' search display preferences. As a result, in a display format that defaults to displaying the smaller option content, either in general or specific to searching for particular content, a user who prefers the larger option must switch to that option each time the user runs a search. In addition, even systems that do maintain such a record contain few display options as described above, and thus do not accurately record users' display preferences.